Remembering Socrates: Philosophical Essays (review)

The twelve contributors to this volume embody the best in ancient philosophical scholarship from America and Europe. Each author presents a carefully-wrought argument that adds substantially to the literature in their chosen topics.

Carlo Natali’s “Socrates’ Dialectic in Xenophon’s Memorabilia” argues for the internal coherence of Xenophon’s conceptions of dialegesthai and dialektikos, and shows how Xenophon portrays elenchos as one method among several Socrates used to encourage his interlocutors to become better citizens. In the eclectic “If You Know What Is Best, You Do It,” Gerhard Seel argues for a weak form of moral intellectualism, the possibility of a deontological Socratic ethics, and for the restriction of “Socratic” knowledge to meta-ethical claims. Charles H. Kahn briefly shows how Plato wrestled with the popular acceptance of hedonism. The strange acceptance of hedonism in the Protagoras is said to be neither straightforwardly ironical nor exactly a thesis Plato himself outright rejected at that time. Terrence Irwin, in “Socrates and Euthyphro,” examines the difference between “god-beloved” and “pious” in terms of a metaphysical rather than conceptual distinction and traces the historical reception of this position. Leslie Brown asks, “Did Socrates Agree to Obey the Laws?” in the Crito, and outlines the scope of obligation his agreement entails. Brown then uses a distinction between “public, performative agreement” and “private, cognitive agreement” to contrast Socrates with Locke on legal responsibility. Vasilis Politis’ “Aporia and Searching in the Early Plato” distinguishes aporia as a puzzle and as a resultant mental state; whether the mental state proves purgative or zetetic depends upon the character of the interlocutor. David Charles suggests in “Types of Definition in the Meno” that Socrates fails to consistently maintain his own distinction between “What is ‘F’?” and “What does ‘F’ name?” definitions when demanding that Meno answer correctly. The volume’s co-editor, Vassilis Karasmanis, presents the Meno not as a continuation of the “Socratic Plato,” but as a properly “Platonic” investigation into the nature of definition itself. Theodore Scaltsas’ “Sharing a Property” mines the Hippias Major for a theory of collective plural predication, revealing that what Hippias endorses is an ontological rather than semantic theory of reference. In “Socrates the Sophist,” C.C.W. Taylor contends that Plato intentionally leaves unclear the boundaries between his depiction of the philosopher and the noble sophist. “Arcesilaus: Socratic and Sceptic” presents John M. Cooper’s attempt to reposition Arcesilaus as a quasi-Socratic within Sextus’s definition of skepticism. Michael Frede, in “The Early Christian Reception of Socrates,” considers the ambivalent reception of the Socrates-figure by early Christian thinkers, who either utilized him rhetorically as a defense against their own persecution or else rejected him as the mouthpiece of pagan philosophy.

Individually, each paper deserves careful consideration. The volume as a whole, however, is problematic. The chapters were selected from a conference held in Delphi in 2001, the complete proceedings of which have already been published under the title, Year of Socrates: 2400 Years since his Death, ed. V. Karasmanis (Athens: European Cultural Centre of Delphi, 2004). This leads a reader to wonder about the necessity of this particular assemblage, which (save the chapter by Scaltsas) repackages selected papers from the previous edition without much substantial revision. Formally, there are awkward differences between chapters in length, the use or transliteration of the Greek, and citation and bibliographical styles. Some chapters still resemble short conference presentations, while some are comprehensive research papers. There are also significant omissions in the collection: we find no nuanced discussion of Socrates and the Athenian cults or of the Socratic daimonion, nothing about reception of Socrates by early Socratics or Hellenist philosophers, nor anything substantial about Socratic writing as a literary genre. As these are among the most important themes in the recent literature, their omission makes this volume into an unsystematic collection of interesting papers instead of a comprehensive treatment of Socrates from varied perspectives.

Of the collected papers, only about half try in some way to “remember” Socrates as a...